Why Elizabeth Warren Should Stay Where She Is

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There are a number of reasons why I pray that Senator Professor Elizabeth Warren ignores the importunings of silly pundits and stays right where she is in the United States Senate for, oh, I don't know, seven terms or so. The most important reason is pure selfishness. She's our senator. You bastids go find one of your own. The second reason, and one that is almost as important, is that she is invaluable right where she is because she is making all the right people completely crazy. Former senator McDreamy, for example, whom she beat like a tin drum in 2012, hasn't gotten over it yet, and is still making noises about loading his carpetbag into the bed of his Potemkin pickup truck and going to New Hampshire in order to get beaten like a tin drum by Jeanne Shaheen. (Run, Scotty, run!) It is pretty plain that she's wrongfooted Wall Street poodle Chuck Schumer pretty badly, too.

CS: You know I helped persuade her to run. There is a good little story. [Looks to aide] I can tell this. I went to Scott Brown and said, "If you give us the sixtieth vote for the Citizens United rollback, we won't go after you." I spent a lot of time lobbying him, and met some of his friends and had them lobby him. He said yes. Then he said no. So I wanted to recruit the strongest candidate against him, and I thought that was Elizabeth Warren.

Damn, all McDreamy had to do was sign on to the useless fig-leaf DISCLOSE Act and the DSCC would have taken a dive on him? He really is as dumb as a rock. And speaking of which, our Chuck is a real rock, is, as he demonstrates later on in the same interview.

CS: It has got to be, to me, a careful balance, OK? Wall Street excesses helped lead to the Great Recession. And to sit there and do nothing, or do what the Republicans want-repeal Dodd-Frank-makes no sense. But on the other hand, I think that you just don't attack Wall Street because they're successful or rich.

No, Chuck. Wall Street excesses did not "help lead to the Great Recession." Wall Street corruption and greed and (I would argue) criminal malfeasance directly caused the Great Recession. And I don't attack them because they're successful or rich. I attack them because they are thieves.

CS: You don't want to go after them for the sake of going after them. The left-wing blogs want you to be completely and always anti-Wall Street. It's not the right way to be.

IC: So are the left-wing blogs as bad as the Tea Party ones in this case?

CS: Left-wing blogs are the mirror image. They just have less credibility and less clout.

Sit, Chuck. Roll over. Good dog.

And it's not just Schumer, either. We are hearing from the Ghosts Of Fake Centrists Past (the inexcusable Al From as well as steam-grate philosopher Pat Caddell) and Centrists Present (the Third Way grifters), all of whom warn of the dangers of taking up too loudly for anyone who can't afford to buy them all dinner. We have even heard from Richard Cohen, who is making a strong rush in the final straightaway to have the single stupidest year ever produced by a pundit not named Bill Kristol.

The boomlet for Warren shows a yearning for a revival of muscular liberalism. But the Obamacare mess has even some liberals - the editor of the aforementioned New Republic, for instance - wondering if this advance in liberalism hasn't in fact set the movement back. To the Democratic left, Warren's heat is the remedy for Obama's cool. To the rest of the country, she might look like Obama all over again.

This may be the most singularly stupid paragraph in a career of singularly stupid paragraphs. First of all, outside of the pages of The New Republic, and that sad battalion of people who for some reason still take the alma mater of Stephen Glass, Ruthie Shalit, Elizabeth McCaughey et.al. seriously, there is no boomlet for Elizabeth Warren. Some people want her to run for president. That is all. And any liberal who decides at this point in time that a botched website and some ginned-up fake hysteria has set liberalism back deserves to be the editor of The New Republic.

I do not want Elizabeth Warren to run for president because I want her to continue to be my senator. I also don't want her to run for president because she might lose -- and, considering she hasn't done anything you do to start a presidential campaign yet, that's the way to bet right now -- and then her message goes down the memory hole. Leave the Republicans out of it for a second. Among the Democrats, she immediately becomes George McGovern. The Schumers, and Froms, and Caddells, and Cohens get to tut-tut liberal populism into yet another early grave and they get license to start taking bids from whoever they see as the next Evan Bayh. If Warren stays in the Senate, she can keep pushing her issues and keep pissing off all the right people. (My dream is not Warren in the White House. It's Warren as chair of the Senate Banking Committee, subpoena power and all.) She can do the work there that desperately needs to be done.